Energy and Quality-Aware Multimedia Signal Processing

This paper presents techniques to reduce energy with minimal degradation in system performance for multimedia signal processing algorithms. It first provides a survey of energy-saving techniques such as those based on voltage scaling, reducing number of computations and reducing dynamic range. While these techniques reduce energy, they also introduce errors that affect the performance quality. To compensate for these errors, techniques that exploit algorithm characteristics are presented. Next, several hybrid energy-saving techniques that further reduce the energy consumption with low performance degradation are presented. For instance, a combination of voltage scaling and dynamic range reduction is shown to achieve 85% energy saving in a low pass FIR filter for a fairly low noise level. A combination of computation reduction and dynamic reduction for Discrete Cosine Transform shows, on average, 33% to 46% reduction in energy consumption while incurring 0.5 dB to 1.5 dB loss in PSNR. Both of these techniques have very little overhead and achieve significant energy reduction with little quality degradation.